


Assorted Asterisms

by Inchoatl



Category: Kidd Commander (Webcomic)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-13
Updated: 2021-02-12
Packaged: 2021-03-12 22:47:45
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,530
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29392200
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Inchoatl/pseuds/Inchoatl
Summary: The alchemy of consumption.
Kudos: 1





	Assorted Asterisms

At the centre of an invisible web sits a city, and in that city is a skyscraper no different than its surrounding siblings standing tall in the beating rain, and in that skyscraper sits a man quietly listening to the patter of water against glass as he considers a set of dossiers. 

Dusk likes the rain, likes how the chaos of a million little drops resolves into a flat wall of static. Order in individuality. The world is full of these little paradoxes, and he always takes a moment to appreciate them when he can. He happens to be one himself, after all.

⁂

_Once upon a time, there was a boy who wanted nothing more than to go out and experience everything the world had to offer._

_Once upon a time, there was a boy who went on an adventure._

_Once upon a time, a boy died._

⁂

Once upon a time a boy's curiosity got the better of him and he went places he never should have gone and saw things he never should have seen and in the end he was consumed by a thousand little wants. And when they got to his core, the wants found him _wanting_ , and they too were consumed in turn, for the sort of curiosity that drives a boy from house and home is a voracity that knows no bound.

Devourer and devoured, Dusk knows consumption like no other. He is the snake that successfully ate its own tail; an inverse fractal, infinite variations on a theme collapsing into a single entity.

And he is still hungry.

A diet of novelty becomes difficult to sustain once you've lived long enough, and Dusk came into being having consumed more novelty than most people encountered in lifetimes. The downside of becoming a large predator is the need for increasingly large prey. Large prey tended to hit back. Hard.

Dusk looks idly down at a file containing the details for one Jocasta Hubris. As far as targets go, Hubris is in a league of her own as far as terrible ideas go. There are stronger people than Hubris, but not many, and not by much, and she has a simplicity that works to her advantage. If you fuck with her or the people she cares about, she will fuck you up. Permanently. If Dusk wanted to take Hubris, it would need to be immediate and fatal. Fast, efficient, and ultimately boring. Empty. An utter waste. There wasn't anything to be gained by involving Hubris. Yet.

Crow Gideon is another story entirely. The avalanche of consequences that follow Gideon wherever he goes has been a source of constant entertainment for Dusk, but as the years go on the interludes between Gideon's various fuck ups grow longer and longer. It may be that Crow Gideon might never truly stop fucking up in new and spectacular ways, but the fact of the matter is that Gideon isn't the source of sustenance he used to be. Better that Dusk take what he can get before Crow became well and truly dull.

To that end, he had drawn in Rook. Aside from Hubris, Raven Slight was Dusk's best bet at getting to Crow Gideon, and Rook presented the best opportunity to manipulate Slight in turn. Dusk's influence on Slight was limited. Raven Slight had been a practiced manipulator for longer than most people had been alive. Longer than many towns had existed for that matter. If Dusk had attempted trying anything even approaching overt the jig would have been up immediately. Letting Raven's daughter encourage his pre-existing self-destructive tendencies, however, well... that had worked a treat. Right up until everything had gone off the rails.

Unfortunately most of Rook's initial capital rested in her ability to influence her father, and it will take some time before Dusk can mould her into anything useful. Luckily for her, he isn't in the habit of throwing away tools the moment they lose a little value. Besides, it suits Dusk to toss out kindness like cheap party favours because the alternative is just so indescribably dull. There's nothing to be gained from pure villainy just the same way there isn't anything of interest in being a saint. The extremes have all been done to death long before he came into existence. It's a little like peer reviewing gravity, not worthless, but something best left to other people; the domain of individuals suffering from a terminal lack of vision. 

Raven's death hadn't been ideal. Ideally the Tain would have wormed their way in far enough to subvert both star and host. Normally stars burn any trace of the Tain in a host, given half the chance. They're territorial that way. But Raven's experiments, bolstered by his daughter's encouragement, had made him uniquely susceptible to the Tain's corrupting influence. Starbearers are rare enough. One as potent, skilled and willing to mutilate himself on a quintessential level as Raven Slight was a rarity bordering on an impossibility, even for people who dealt in impossibilities. 

Even as deaths go, Slight's was wasteful. There's so much potential in the death of a man like Raven Slight. Dusk had hoped to see Crow Gideon behold what had become of his brother, and trace the lines of cause and effect back to each and every one of his own actions. As it is, Slight's death will wound Gideon, but it will not be the knife twisting in his heart that Dusk had hoped it would be.

Dusk regrets Raven's loss.

Dusk does not regret the opportunity to see Phineas Kidd in action.

She's barely more than a child, and yet... A Commander. A _sunchaser_. Trained by both Crow Gideon and Jocasta Hubris, oh yes, he'd seen the marks they'd both left on her clearer than day. And then she survived Raven's suicide gambit. No matter that Raven was trying to kill himself, she had no business surviving an encounter with him. To the beings she deals with, she's barely an afterthought, a stray musing on a Wednesday afternoon, there and gone. And yet Raven Slight is dead and Phineas Kidd flies on towards Kairos Crossing.

Dusk is certain that no matter where she goes, Phineas Kidd is certain to leave behind her a wake of upheaval. In a handful of days she forced him to rearrange a great many of his plans, and has permanently supplanted Raven Slight as Dusk's best opportunity to strike at Crow Gideon. 

He couldn't help speaking to her at Decodenn. He was in town anyways, and even if he has resources that can keep track of her, that coat makes her hellishly difficult for _him_ to hunt down. Who knows when he'd next have the chance to talk to her, and it's never too early to get the first hook in. He'd meant everything he'd said, because the best lies are the ones that aren't, and in the end it really is about _choice_. The parameters of that choice though, the who, the what, the when, the how, well that's where he does his best work. Not that he has to, of course. He was heavy handed enough on the silverspeak for her to notice easily enough, and then her suspicion can do the heavy lifting from there.

It really does suit her though, that jacket, because Phineas Kidd doesn't simply have a target on her, she _is_ a target, one painted big and bright on the back of everything worth a damn in this entire world. Dusk hasn't been this excited in _decades_.

Leaving Kidd's ambitions to grow and gain momentum isn't without dangers. Given where he came from, Dusk knows that no one and nothing is invincible, that there is always an element of risk in existence. It's why he can't stand the fearful, the timid, those that try day and night to prune and file a glorious tomorrow down into a safe today. There is no safe today, and there never will be, so why bother? Go big or go home.

Which isn't an excuse to be stupid. Dusk has as many contingencies as he has plans. The future suffers fools just as gladly as it suffers the fearful, and there is no glorious tomorrow for idiots who die the first time the indifference of eternity rears its head and they can't roll with the punches.

Dusk has always been a proponent of using every tool at one's disposal, and there are some avenues that are uniquely his. He has spent a very long time setting a great many things in motion, and he is determined to bear witness to the fruit of his labours, one way or another. And he will, because no matter what comes, Dusk has a failsafe that nothing, neither god nor star nor prodigal commander can touch. 

He has you.

Because in reading you have witnessed, and in witnessing you have consumed, and so there is now a little bit of Dusk sitting in the core of your being, in your very soul. So the next time you go out, take a moment to look around and see the world through his eyes.

Go on, make a boy happy.

**Author's Note:**

> Likely janky since it's patched together from frayed recollections since I lost the original document when my OS went wonky on me.


End file.
